by Dan Robson
He was proud of that. I was too.
But now I can’t even recall in what grade they teach the Pythagorean theorem—and I’m bewildered by basic math.
I wonder if my university degrees hold any more value than the experience my father gained on the job when he was still just a teenager, or if it was all just an illusion we bought into. All this time, the unspoken contract was that I was supposed to surpass him in some way. But here I am, no better suited in life than he was, and trying—and failing—to figure out how he managed to hold everything up.
Matt has moved from the shower where I’m grouting and has started wiping down the black subway tiles next to Jonathan. He tells me he went to trade school during his electrician’s apprenticeship, but that it really just reinforced what he’d already learned on job sites.
“The fun part is making connections,” he says. “You see things on site and then you see it in class, and you’re like, ‘Oh right, of course, that’s why I did that.’ That kind of thing.”
It was the reverse, too: seeing stuff in class and then making it work in practice, he says. But it was also the people he met along the way.
“There were tons of characters, man,” he says. Like the guy from Iraq, a former soldier, who showed him photos of the rifles he carried and the friends who’d been killed. And a guy from North Bay—super smart, but with a serious attention deficit disorder—who would sit at the back of the class and cause trouble, distracting everyone, playing games and stuff. He was just there because he needed to finish trade school. He already had a job as a lineman working on hydro lines.
“He was already making a thousand a week as a third-term apprentice,” Matt says.
“What does third term mean?” I ask.
“He has another two years before he can make his full wage rate. If you can get in, it’s good money. You have to travel a bit.” They’d work all over the place for a year, putting in their time. “It can be rough that way,” Matt tells me. “But when he’s done he finally gets to go where he wants. Those guys, when there’s an ice storm, man they make a lot of money. Overtime is like double. They’ll work sixteen- hour days—doing whatever they have to do to get everyone back online.”
I picture these linemen clipped to the side of hydro poles in blistering snowstorms or in violent rain in the middle of nowhere, trying to get power restored to families in houses nearby who’ll never know their names and never appreciate the work they do.
We keep grouting the tiles, nearing the finish. Matt stops to admire the work. “It’s pretty crazy to think that two weeks ago we were just tearing down walls and putting up walls,” he says.
He’s right. The bathroom looks large and bright. I’m astounded. This space was nothing for so long—grey and dank and forgotten. There’s a shiny tub and marble-print tiles where Dad’s tool bench sat.
Matt seems proud of the work he’s done—and maybe, in a way, of what he’s taught me.
The drywall is done and patched. The bedroom still needs to be painted. The doors on the electrical box still need to go up. The wires are a mess. The pot lights are finished, except for one that dangles in the bedroom from the fixture. The job is almost complete.
“It’s amazing how things can change,” I say.
25
Gord Holmes was a person I’d often heard about but had never met. He’d become a close friend of Dad while I was away at school. They met one day at church, when Gord walked in hazy and blurred by constant drug use. He’d served in the navy for three years, but at twenty-one he started using cocaine heavily, spiralling into addiction once he learned how to make crack. I remember Dad taking Gord’s phone calls, and I’d heard about him driving to Toronto in the middle of the night to get him help.
I found Gord on Facebook and asked if he’d tell me about my father.
“Hi Dan,” he wrote. “I’d be honoured to share with you my memories of your father. Quite honestly, I don’t think I’d be alive today if it wasn’t for his friendship and guidance through some difficult periods of my life.”
I didn’t know how Dad would have managed to connect with someone who lived on the margins as Gord had. But when I reach him by phone, it’s obvious. Gord is a toolman too. They spoke the same language. Today he does carpentry work. He’s building a custom closet company, and does some plumbing on the side.
“Basic plumbing is pretty straightforward,” he laughs. “You could basically teach a monkey how to do it. I’ve got some skills that I’m happy with—and I guess proud of. But I’m not going to build a house from the ground up, either.”
I tell him about my own renovation project and what I’m trying to learn. My hope is to use these tools as well as Dad did, I say.
Gord says he had the chance to witness Dad’s proficiency firsthand when he helped him build a set for the church’s Christmas performance. Dad led the way, as he usually did when volunteers gathered to build or fix things at the church and school.
“Your dad wanted things done his way,” Gord says. “He was very assertive about expressing that.”
We both laugh. My father had little patience for doing things the wrong way, which meant a different way from his way. Watching Dad work, Gord hoped to learn how to use tools in a way that could help support him on his journey out of addiction.
In his darkest place, Gord was dependent on crack. It hits you in a different way than cocaine, he tells me. It’s an immediate, aggressive high. The euphoria is all-consuming. It became psychologically addictive. “It’s not a cheap habit,” he says—it was costing him $200 a day. Gord tried to work odd jobs, “but it was hard to have a job where you had to show up on a regular basis. I had lost the ability to be that responsible.”
Some of the addicts he hung out with were tradesmen who worked as roofers when they could. He’d live with them, and during the months they could work they’d find roofs to repair or eavestroughs to clean. But if he couldn’t make money at that during the day, he’d have to go out and “boost.” He peddled drugs when he could in exchange for being able to use them for free. And when he needed to earn a bit more, he’d break into garages and steal tools and bicycles. But the best hauls were always the tools, for which there was a market that was both consistent and easy to access. “I was committing crime pretty much every day,” he says.
Sometimes Gord would walk tools right out of big box stores like Home Depot and Rona—at the time, he tells me, they were pretty easy to steal from. Often he’d sell the goods directly to contractors. Or he’d go to pawn shops—known as “the fence”—that would ask few questions and buy at a third of the retail price. It was a risky operation, though. Gord was busted several times—once by a Home Depot loss-prevention officer who’d been looking for scams like his. Another time he was caught during a break-and-enter in a Dodge Ram he’d stolen. (He’d often steal cars to use for a few days and then dump after his theft spree.) “The police pulled up right behind me basically when I was in the middle of doing the job,” he says.
He ended up in jail several times. He’d spend a couple of weeks in holding cells, keeping his head down and avoiding fights, until he could see a judge and be released with time served.
It was a constant cycle. Just like rehab. He’d been to treatment for addiction six times, his last stint lasting a year before he was out, couch surfing with old friends who helped thrust him back into drug use. He didn’t have a place of his own. “That’s classified as being homeless,” Gord says. “But I never spent a night on the streets.”
Outside of jail and rehab, there were times when he’d managed to pull himself out of drug use for long stretches of time. Once, he was clean for six months. But when he tagged along with a girlfriend to church the morning he met Dad, Gord was thirty-four and on the edge of another spiral.
Dad introduced himself. They talked for a while and exchanged numbers. After that, they spoke often. Gord started c
oming to the church on Wednesday nights, and sometimes Dad would drive down to Kipling Station in Toronto to pick him up and bring him to Brampton.
There were times when a few weeks might go by if Gord was using. Sometimes he’d dial my father’s number but hang up before he answered. “Your dad would know,” he says. That’s when Dad would drive into the city to find him. When he did, they’d sit in a coffee shop until the world felt manageable again. “Every once in a while he would give me a blast of crap, because I needed it. If your mom was there she would always whisper in his ear and the tone would change.”
He pauses.
“I’d forgotten about this,” Gord says. “I’m getting a little emotional about it. I called him at eleven-thirty one Friday night and said ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ And him and your mom drove down to pick me up in Toronto, and drove me to a detox out in the east end.” He laughs. “I think he did that twice. I can’t remember. I know it’s because I was too messed up to, to be honest with you.”
They spoke often about life on the other side of addiction, Gord continues. He had hope. He wanted to learn more about the trades he knew and to emulate the work Dad did. He wanted to design and build stuff. He applied to the architecture program at Sheridan College.
“I’d never had that support before,” Gord says. “Or that person—that sort of rock or foundation of a relationship with somebody where I could be honest with them and know that they would still love me unconditionally. I didn’t grow up in that environment.”
But the cycle was vicious, and he kept spinning back to the places he was trying to escape. “My addiction wouldn’t allow for it,” he says. He couldn’t be the person he wanted to be. “I like to look at my work at the end of the day and take pride in what I’ve done.”
In August 2007, he called my father again. Dad picked him up in the blue F-150 and headed to a London rehab centre three hours west, Gord sleeping most of the way. In the months that followed he’d call Dad on a pay phone, using a calling card he gave him. My parents drove down to see him at Christmas. Gord spent a year there.
When he left, he says, he finally felt he had control of the disease he’d grappled with for so long. He and Dad continued to hang out while Gord pieced his life together. He completed an addiction and community service program and started working with others who suffered from drug use. And he worked as a carpenter, using the kinds of tools he used to steal.
“That’s why your dad was so important to me,” Gord says. “Honestly, Dan—and I don’t say what I’m about to say very lightly—but I wouldn’t be alive without your dad and the love that he showed me. He didn’t treat me any differently than he treated anybody else, even though I kept slipping up. He was always there for me.”
In 2010, Gord got married. My parents were there. He became a step-parent to a lovely daughter. They moved north, to Barrie. He has six dogs, three cats, a bunny, and three birds. He kept studying in school and working with addicts in their recoveries. And he kept a garage full of tools.
Then one day, Jai called him and told him Dad had died. Gord was standing in his kitchen when he got the call.
“I was shocked,” he says. It’d been several months since they’d last spoken. He regretted that. Gord went into his e-mail and found the last message he’d sent Dad. It was a note thanking him for never giving up on him.
“I wouldn’t be alive,” he says. “When I needed your dad the most, he was there. He was just always there.”
We both go quiet, suddenly feeling the same absence.
“I don’t know how you view it, Dan,” Gord begins. “I view it as God saying, ‘Job well done—and I’m taking you home.’ ”
“Yeah,” I say—meaning, I don’t view it that way at all.
We’re quiet again.
“He absolutely saved my life,” Gord says. “You should be proud of him.”
Part VI
Square, Plumb, and Level
26
In the late afternoon I drive in from Toronto to meet with my mom and Jenna for a final walk-through of the new basement.
On my way, I take a detour to the Brampton train station.
I think of it as Dad’s station because he spent several years managing its massive renovation, including the construction of a pedestrian tunnel that runs beneath the tracks and connects to the street on the other side. I park the pickup on the road beside the entrance. Although the project was a huge undertaking, the tunnel itself is a forgettable concrete pathway. Now hundreds of people stream along it every day, rushing through the routine of their lives. But I walk through it slowly, as if it’s an architectural masterpiece. Something that will be remembered.
The tunnel is just one of the great wonders I’ve quietly visited over the months since my father’s passing. There were the townhomes around the corner, the residential apartments across from the mall, the Sunoco gas stations scattered across Toronto and its suburbs. I’ve returned to every place I remember visiting with him while they were still being built. I’m not sure what I hoped to find. Each location is just a small part of everyday life for everyone else. It carries its own kind of beauty that way. There’s no sign at the tunnel’s entrance, no public record of the man who was in charge of building the walkway you follow to catch a train each morning. The families living in those apartments and townhouses have no notion of the day my father pulled his truck into an empty lot and showed his son the blueprints of what would rise there. The kids dreaming in the backseat while their parents stop for gas after a weeknight road game would never consider the people who put it in place.
Dad’s structures were canvases for other people’s lives.
I walk the length of the dark, grey tunnel and up the stairs into the light at the end. The station is quiet. I remember Dad dropping me off here when I was a young reporter at the Toronto Star, still living at home. It was just a few years ago. We’d roll up in his truck in the morning rush. Sometimes some of his crew would be there, working on the tunnel. Sometimes he’d remind me that this was one of his sites.
He could sense the stress I felt about the chaotic world of daily news. He didn’t pretend to understand. “You’ve got this, buddy,” he’d say. “I love you.”
And when I came back at night, sometimes on the last ride before midnight, he’d be there waiting.
That year, my sisters and I gave our parents a family photo shoot as a Christmas gift. We took the pictures at the train station. Dad and I stood side by side on the platform, next to the tracks’ edge. He was still finishing the job then. He pointed out some of the work he was doing, but we didn’t take much notice. It was just a boring tunnel.
Soon it will be tagged by graffiti. A drunk man will relieve himself on one of the walls. The fresh concrete will grow dark and damp. Rodents would find refuge there. One day, rushing commuters will do their best to avoid it. In fifty years, maybe a hundred—maybe two—it will decay beyond repair and be replaced.
But right now, I wish my father knew that someone felt that this tunnel was the greatest underground commuter pathway ever completed. I wish he knew how proud he’d made his son. And all the piss, graffiti, and rats to come would never change that.
Mom and Jenna are at the house when I pull into the driveway. I give them a tour of the basement.
Jai came by the night before and took a critical eye to the project. She marked imperfections that needed to be fixed with little yellow sticky notes. Agreeing with her, Mom and Jenna now point each one out to me.
There’s a crooked piece of tile near the ceiling. Mom tells me she wants that changed.
The tiles on the wall with the shower are uneven, Jenna says. They jut out a fraction in places.
“That needs to be changed too,” Mom says.
We’ve already taken down all the tiling we put up around the faucet and shower head—the part I had done—because it wasn’t even. Now just
a faint outline of the old grout remains.
I’m frustrated. They have no idea how long it took to put these tiles up. I can hear Jai’s voice, too—the three of them are driving me crazy.
“And I’m going to tell Matt this grout should be grey, not white,” Mom says, pointing to the lines between the tiles on the floor.
“No,” I say. I’m exasperated.
“It shouldn’t be yellow,” Jenna puts in.
It’s not yellow. “Oh geez, guys…”
Jenna doubles down. “No, but it shouldn’t be dirty.”
Dirty?
In her assessment, Jai also pointed out how messy the grout work was around the base of the toilet.
It looks fine to me.
No, the grout is too wide around the toilet, Mom insists.
She says it feels as if we rushed at the end to get the job done. She refers only to “Matt”—not acknowledging that I’m part of this too. I feel the same frustration I’ve felt towards Jayme. They just don’t understand.
I sigh—a deep and angry sigh. “The colour is nice,” I say, pointing to the walls.
Mom can see that I’m getting upset. “The colour is great,” she says. “It’s better than what Jai said…”
I’m thinking of all the little details that went wrong along the way, knowing that the imperfections are probably a result of things I failed to do properly. I’m defensive.
“Okay, you know what, the honest truth,” I say. “That’s fine.” I point to the thin strip of dark tiles that have been cut to fill in the edges of the subway pattern above the sink. “You can’t fix that—I, like, that’s—how do you even do it?” I say. “Think about it.”